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Comment by schneems | Hacker News Reader

I think having fines be a major funding source distracts from the purpose of the enforcement. They’re supposed to be there for public safety, not for making sure there’s a Christmas bonus.

There are countries where traffic fines are based as a percent of salary rather than flat rates. That way the rich are equally incentivized to obey the laws.

That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.

It seems like if it’s a limit, it should be an actual sensible number and be an actual limit. Instead of this kafkaesque system where everyone can be deemed guilty at will.

Likewise I feel other behaviors like tailgating and aggressive driving aren’t enforced and (imho) cause more accidents.

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Yesterday I was driving and noticed that Google Maps shows user-reported speed traps nowadays. It was fairly accurate and warned me of 2-3 speed traps during my trip. It triggered a thought for me of "wouldn't police departments fight to keep this information out of our hands?" and then I thought of the compelling reason "if the goal of enforcement is to get people to make the roads safer, then this little speed trap warning is actually much more effective at getting that behavior out of me, since I started slowing down a few miles before the trap."

> That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.

In some countries such deviations aren't punished. Either they simply don't have a fine/points for going 5-10kmph above the speed limit, or have a relative window depending on the speed. The error of the measuring device might also be considered. And until recently most cars had a builtin "error" in the speed reading of up to 10% mainly to account for slight differences in tire wear and to remove any legal liability from the manufacturer in case of false readings. These days I've seen plenty of cars being spot on because they use GPS to measure so that changes that "buffer". So going 5 over limit usually means a bit more.

Too much flexibility for the police officer isn't great, I agree. It incentivizes abuse of power. The case above isn't one of those though.

California has a requirement that speed limits be set based on a speed survey, except for like school zones and highways posted at 65 or more.

That doesn't help much if you get a ticket for 70 in a 65 when prevailing traffic was doing 75, but at least it prevents some abuses.

But speeding probably get attention because it's objective. Harder to testify about tailgating distance, because there's no printout from the speedgun.

Some EU countries have speed-controlled lights. So if one person goes over the limit it holds everyone up for a couple of minutes.

There are no tickets or fines, just chagrin. It works surprisingly well.

I'm not aware of lights like that in the US but we do have places where the stoplights are timed to a few mph below the speed limit. If you drive 38, you'll hit every green light. If you drive 45, you get to stop at red lights while the car going 38 catches up.

Some people insist on going 50 anyway and I swear some people think that if they go 80 they'll also get the green lights. :)

If there are multiple red-green cycles per 38mph interval, the 80-goers would be right! ;) (eg. you launch from the first light, the next light ahead goes green, red, green before you get through)

Speed limits are 100% political. They aren’t based on engineering. You always have cops saying “speed was a factor in this collision” and “everyone just needs to slow down to be safe.” But the reality is that accidents don’t happen from high speed, they happen from a high standard deviation among speed of individual cars on the road. Having a speed limit well below what the road can safely be driven at creates that high standard deviation as some people drive to the road while others drive to the limit.

The collective insanity that we as a society have around setting sensible maximum speeds for roads is one of my bigggest pet peeves.

> a high standard deviation among speed of individual cars on the road

so in a world without speed limits, people can individually decide what speed a road "feels like". in a world with speed limits, people can still do that but there's a sign stating a preferred speed for the road and an (admittedly flawed) enforcement mechanism.

I really can't fathom how the former leads to less "deviation" than the latter.

not agreeing with post you responded to, but you're misrepresenting them.

my understanding of the post is that he proposes speed limits should not be set so low as to increase the deviation between people following the speed limit and following their intuition i.e. they should approach average intuitive speed of the drivers using the road.

We do seem to end up with a ratchet effect though. My town sets speed limits at the 85th percentile of speeds based on traffic surveys. Say the limit starts at 30. Most drivers assume a buffer before there will be enforcement, so they start driving 35. Next time the city studies that road, they raise the limit to 35 and drivers start going 40. Rinse. repeat.

Eventually, you end up like our main road through town where the limit is 45, the state limit for that type of surface street. Many drivers are happy to go 50 but the area has built up and also gets a lot of drivers unfamiliar with the area and those drivers go 30. It's a real mess and there are multiple crashes daily but I don't think the speed limit will ever be lowered. I think I've only seen the speed limit lowered on one road in the almost 20 years I've lived here. They only change in one direction.

Leaving aside the simple physics of more kinetic energy making those 'standard deviations' clearly more serious for all involved, we clearly don't want high speed traffic in environments with pedestrians and cyclists. So while the Autobahn may not be a nonstop catastrophe, I would think it's clear that speed limits on non-freeways are far from "100% political".

>I would think it's clear that speed limits on non-freeways are far from "100% political".

This depends on the locale, and what you consider "political". For example, in NYC it is entirely "political/financial. For some time now the city-wide speed limit has been set at 25 mph, with thousands of speed cameras that automatically ticket people. While on some streets this may be reasonable, it is certainly not reasonable city-wide (which includes all the outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx). In her annual address this month, Governor Hochul announced that the city-wide speed limit will be lowered even further, below 25 mph! This means that at the maximum legal speed, your car will be passed by bikes, mopeds and even fast runners. This is clearly not a safety issue, thought some will argue it is "safer" (and it would be safer still if the speed limit was 0, nobody would ever die from an auto accident!). It a combination of a money-making scam and a political ploy to curry favor from the small (but politically powerful) group of New Yorkers who want to eliminate cars all together.

To be clear, a huge majority of crashes happen at the interface points between multiple traffic streams. Higher speeds in that situation is absolutely both an exacerbating factor in the likelihood of a crash (by increasing the stopping distance) and the severity of the crash when it happens.

The ticket is to design roads such that people naturally drive at safer speeds. The collective insanity is that we as a society allow engineers to pretend that features intended to speed up traffic are a safety mechanism.

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